Vacation Rambles

by Thomas Hughes

But I thought the German students were always fighting duels.

So they were, but only with swords, which they were always practising. They were so padded when they fought that they could not be hurt except just in the face, and the sword arm was so bandaged that there was no play at all except from the wrist. You would see the German students even when out walking, miles away from the town, keeping playing away with their walking-sticks all the time, so as to train their wrists.

What was his quarrel about?

Well, it was just this. The American students, of whom there were a large number there, kept pretty much to themselves, and no love was lost between them and the Germans. They had an American Club to which they all belonged, just to keep them together and see any fellow through who was in a scrape. He and some of the American students were sitting in the beer garden, close to a table of Germans. Forgetting the neighbourhood, he had tilted his chair and leant back in it, and so come against a German head. The owner jumped up, and a sharp altercation followed, ending in the German’s calling him out with swords. This he refused, but sent a challenge to fight with pistols by the President of the Club, a real fine man, who had shot his two men down South before he went to Heidelberg. The answer to this was his arrest, and arrest was a very serious thing now. For some little time since, a German and an American fought, with swords first and then with pistols. The American had his face cut open from the eye right down across the mouth, but when it came to pistols he shot the German, who died in an hour. So he was in jail, and challenging with pistols had been made an offence punishable by imprisonment, and that was no joke in a German military prison.

Did he expect the University authorities would send after him then?

No; but his folk were all in Germany for the winter. He had a younger brother at Heidelberg who had taken his bag down to the station for him, and would have let his father know, as he had told him to do. If he had telegraphed the old gentleman might come straight off and stop him yet, but he rather guessed he would he so mad he wouldn’t come. No; he didn’t expect to see his folk again for three or four years.

But why? After all, sending a challenge of which nothing came was not so very heinous an offence.

Yes, but it was the second time. He had run from an American university to escape expulsion for having set fire to an outhouse. Then he went straight to New York, which he wanted to see, and stopped till his money was all gone. His father was mad enough about that.

I said plainly that I didn’t wonder, and was going to add something by way of improving the occasion, but for a look of such deep sorrow which passed over the boy’s face that I thought his conscience might well do the work better than I could.

He opened his bag and took out a photograph, and then his six-shooter—a self-cocking German one, he said, which was quicker and carried a heavier ball than any he had seen in America; and then his pipes and cigar tubes; and then he rolled a cigarette and lighted it; and, as the dawn was now come, began to ask questions about the country. But all in vain; back the scene he was running from came, do what he would. His youngest brother, a little fellow of ten, was down with fever. He had spoilt Christmas for the whole family. It would cut them up awfully. But to a suggestion that he should go straight back he could not listen. No, he was going straight through to California, the best place for him. He had never done any good yet, but he was going to do it now. He had got a letter or two to Californians from some of his fellow-students, which would give him some opening. He wouldn’t see his people for four or five years, till he got something to show them. He would have to pitch right in, or else starve. He would go right into the first thing that came along out there, and make something.